Nicholaï Hel's only previous appearance was in the bestselling 1979 novel Shibumi, written by "Trevanian", the pseudonym of American academic Rodney William Whitaker. Western by birth but Japanese by upbringing and inclination, the green-eyed, Go-playing Hel – a master of the secret martial art of hoda korosu, or naked/kill – provided a joyfully preposterous take on the thriller genre and captured jaded imaginations around the world.

Whitaker was constantly pestered to return to the world of Hel, but said in a 1998 interview that "after the definitive exercise of the [super-spy] genre that was Shibumi, there was no point in me writing further in this genre… or anyone else, for that matter". But after he died in 2005, his heirs approached Don Winslow, author of slick, spare crime novels including the acclaimed The Power of the Dog, to write a prequel. And so Nicholaï Hel, artful lover and assassin, hero of a million teenage boys in the 80s, is back.

Winslow has written "to the 'corners' of the story that [Trevanian] had left in place", so where in Shibumi a mature, Zen-like Hel had retired from being the world's highest paid assassin, Satori takes the action back to 1951, before he learned to kill for profit. It picks up his story just after his release from three years in solitary confinement for killing his mentor (he used this time to learn Basque and to hone his "proximity sense"). The Americans want Hel freed because, thanks to his linguistic skills and ability to kill using everyday objects, he is possibly the only man able to assassinate the Soviet commissioner to China, the evil Voroshenin.

Moving from the heart of communist China to the jungles of Vietnam, from Russian torture chambers to the treacherous tightrope that is life in Saigon, Winslow, a Shibumi fan since his teens (he even learned Go, he reveals in an author's note), has clearly had immense fun diving into the world of Hel. He provides him with a love interest, the beautiful French Solange. He piles on the Go metaphors and ramps up the villainy and double-crossing to produce a sprawling, effervescent, page-turning account of how the assassin was made.

Yes, he might fail to nail the tongue-in-cheek pomposity of the original. Where Trevanian refused to reveal the details of naked/kill in case they "contribute to the harm done to (and by) the uninitiated", Winslow has Hel variously attacking baddies with teacups and copies of Paris Match. Where Trevanian decided to "keep certain advanced sexual techniques in partial shadow, as they might be dangerous, and would certainly be painful, to the neophyte", Winslow has Hel going at it with Solange. But he makes a fine fist of things nonetheless, and Satori ("the Zen Buddhist concept of a sudden awakening, a realisation of life as it really is") will be both devoured by Hel fans and enjoyed by those unversed in his ways. With a new edition of Shibumi in the offing, and the door clearly left open for sequels, Hel is probably going to gather a whole new host of fans.